VMware Cloud on AWS landed in Europe today, marking the hybrid cloud service’s first expansion beyond the U.S. with its availability in Amazon Web Services’ London region.

Also today, VMware announced several new software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and hybrid cloud capabilities.

Initially launched about six months ago, VMware Cloud on AWS allows VMware customers to run their workloads in the AWS public cloud using the same VMware software stack. In November, the partners made the service available across the entire U.S. (initial availability was limited to the AWS U.S. West region), and also added new capabilities such as live migration and disaster recovery.

The hybrid cloud service is now available in the AWS London region, “with Frankfurt coming soon and Asia Pacific in the second half of 2018,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager for VMware’s cloud platform business unit.

VMware and AWS today also announced new capabilities for their joint service.

Stretched Clusters and Storage Capacity

One of these, called Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS, allows workloads to run on top of multiple AWS availability zones. This service is available in preview, and the aim is to protect mission-critical applications against data center and availability zone outages, as well as host and virtual machine (VM) failures.

“What this provides to our customers is zero recovery point objective high availability across AWS availability zones,” Lohmeyer said. “So if there’s a blip in one AWS availability zone, that data has already been replicated in the second AWS zone.”

Matt Garman, VP of AWS compute services, said the new cloud capability provides higher availability than an enterprise can achieve in its own data center. “If their on-premises data center loses power or networking for any reason, they will still lose access to their missions-critical workloads in their own data centers,” he said.

Additionally, native VMware virtual storage area network (vSAN) compression and deduplication features are now enabled for VMware Cloud on AWS customers. VMware says this can cut storage costs in half for typical workloads.

“Compression and deduplication basically doubles the storage capacity that the workloads can take advantage of, at significant cost savings to the customer — well over $1 million [over three years] with this new capability,” Lohmeyer said.

VMware and AWS also announced new migration services. VMware’s vMotion enables live migration of running VMs from one physical server to another with zero downtime. An extension of this service, now available in preview, enables migration between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS, and between hosts across clusters within VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware said it will also add vMotion between hosts in a stretched cluster across two AWS availability zones.

New and Improved Cloud Services

In addition to the new VMware Cloud on AWS capabilities, VMware today announced several new SaaS products. These include:

Hybrid Cloud Extension for private clouds, which provides application mobility across different vSphere versions, on-premises, and in the cloud. VMware previously announced Hybrid Cloud Extension services for both IBM Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS. It now added a service for self-managed private enterprise data centers.

An expanded Wavefront service, which is a SaaS-based metrics monitoring and analytics platform. It supports cloud-native and enterprise applications, and both public and private cloud infrastructure, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and now VMware Cloud on AWS and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

New Log Intelligence, which uses machine learning algorithms and real-time log analytics to scan for anomalies in VMware-based data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS. This provides IT troubleshooting and centralized log management across multiple clouds.

An expanded Cost Insight, which calculates the capacity and cost of running apps in VMware private clouds, or on AWS and Microsoft Azure public clouds. The cost management service now also provides assessments for migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS.

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Jessica is a Senior Editor, covering next-generation data centers, security, and software-defined storage at SDxCentral. She has worked as an editor and reporter for more than 15 years at a number of B2B publications including Environmental Leader, Energy Manager Today, Solar Novus Today and Silicon Valley Business Journal. Jessica is based in the Silicon Valley.

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